He was a sham entrepreneur, a bogus diplomat and a financial speculator. Even after the outbreak of the war, he only thought about how to make a fortune. Despite this, the émigré authorities and the Polish underground saw him as a trusted ally. Why was he not recognized as a traitor for so long?
Samson Mikiciński was born in 1885 in the vicinity of Bielsk Podlaski to a Polonized Jewish family. He studied law in St. Petersburg and served in the Russian army during World War I. Then he fought under Denikin against the Bolsheviks - supposedly as an intelligence officer. After the defeat of the whites, he emigrated to Paris. There, in order to earn a living, he engaged in forgery of promissory notes.
When the police became interested in him, he went to Berlin, where he began putting counterfeit dollars into circulation. He returned to Poland at the end of the 1920s. In Poland, he acted as a representative of various French and Belgian companies. He also tried to trade with the Soviet Union:he established contacts with the Sowpoltorg company. This made Polish intelligence pay attention to him. And perhaps it was then that Samson became a collaborator of the Two, that is, Division II of the General Staff of the Polish Army.
Head of business
Searching for an opportunity to earn money, Mikiciński entered various, not always serious, undertakings. For example, he became the president of the Polish-Peruvian Chamber of Commerce, from which he embezzled money; in addition, in business contacts claimed to be the vice-consul of Peru . In 1937 he got a job at the "Argos" travel agency, and a year later he acquired shares in another office - "Poltour". The offices were used by him to start a lucrative business:he helped German and Austrian Jews to leave Germany.
At the end of the 1930s, Mikiciński helped German and Austrian Jews to emigrate. The photo shows a Jewish shop in Magdeburg destroyed during the Kristallnacht.
Samson traveled around Europe and bought visas to South American countries, on the basis of which his clients later emigrated. As noted by the famous popularizer of history Sławomir Koper in his latest book "Piekiełko nad Wisłą", this activity had to be approved by German intelligence. At that time, the Pole knew Captain Erich Nobis from the Wrocław branch of the Abwehr very well.
Buying visas was not the only contact of the "vice-consul of Peru" with South America. In the summer of 1939, the Chilean diplomat Hector Briones Luco came to Warsaw with the intention of opening a diplomatic mission there. The two men met in the capital, and Mikiciński accepted a job offer at the consulate. He sold his shares in travel agencies and received a Chilean diplomatic passport. As it soon turned out, it was a business worth its weight in gold.
After the outbreak of the war, using this particular passport, the newly minted diplomat left for Lithuania, and then via Sweden he reached Belgium. While in the West, he realized that differences in exchange rates allowed for easy earnings . So once a week he traveled from Paris to Brussels and bought dollars for francs. Then he transported them to Paris and sold them, and he made over 20% of the price difference. The business was great and Mikiciński did well; reportedly only by the end of 1939 he had collected a fortune worth as much as $ 30,000. But that was just the beginning. As Sławomir Koper writes, “the time of big business was yet to come”.
Flying Consul
Here Briones Luco appointed Mikiciński a consul in Warsaw and instructed him to organize a post in the city. There was indeed a consulate in the capital, which was so strange that the Germans liquidated all diplomatic representations there, except for the rudimentary Italian embassy. Not only that, his seat was ... the former flat of General Kazimierz Sosnkowski at 2 Frascati Street.
It is possible that the entire project took place in agreement with the Polish authorities in exile in Paris. Samson probably offered the Polish government the possibility of safely transporting letters and money for the resistance movement to the occupied country. According to another version, he was asked by General Władysław Sikorski himself during a meeting in November 1939. "I feel I am a Polish citizen and am at the disposal of the Polish government" - said an enterprising diplomat reportedly.
On December 1, 1939, Mikiciński received one and a half million zlotys from the staff of General Kazimierz Sosnkowski (then the chief commander of the Union of Armed Struggle) for the activities of the ZWZ in Poland. He also took many private letters, parcels and money, and then left for Berlin. There it turned out that there were some difficulties in obtaining a travel permit to Warsaw. Eventually, he was helped by an old friend - Captain Erich Nobis from Abwehr.
After arriving in the capital, Mikiciński settled in Sosnkowski's apartment and began handing over money and parcels. He did so in a way that disregarded all the rules of the conspiracy . As Colonel Kazimierz Iranek-Osmecki, later head of the Home Army intelligence service recalled:
He searched for interested people by phone, called himself or appointed them meeting places in public places. As a result, many people resigned from the donated amounts, others, feeling threatened, changed apartments and went into conspiracy.
Interestingly, despite the fears, no one who was contacted by the peculiar courier was arrested. This meant that his activities were somehow approved or controlled by the Germans.
At the request of the Polish authorities in exile, Mikiciński transported huge sums of money.
The successful transfer of money from Paris to Warsaw meant that the consul was assigned another task. In September 1939, Romania had large stocks of Polish zlotys, so the government asked Mikiciński to bring them to the country. In January 1940, he went to Bucharest, where he collected PLN 7 million in cash. For their transport to the General Government, he was promised a 15 percent commission. By the way, he willingly took private money, letters and parcels from Polish officers and officials staying in Romania - the commission here was already 30 percent.
Interestingly, in Bucharest, Samson was accompanied by Captain Nobis. Both men loaded sacks with money for the underground on the plane and flew with them… to Berlin. Only from there the money was transported to Warsaw. Overall, however, the expedition went smoothly, and Mikiciński's fame as a man of great potential grew. Although the new commander of the ZWZ, Colonel Stefan Rowecki, complained in a report from March 1940 that the consul provided only PLN 2.7 million and his talkativeness exposes people to exposure, but his collaborator's successes extinguished these doubts.
Mikiciński was able to get his brother-in-law, Zygmunt Graliński (pictured) out of the German camp without any problems.
What else did the diplomat deserve? Well, he was able to get Karol Eiger, brother-in-law of Zygmunt Graliński, deputy foreign minister in the government of General Sikorski, out of a concentration camp. He also issued Polish Jews with Chilean visas honored by the occupier, thanks to which they could leave the occupied country. At the request of some aristocratic families, he also transported valuable items from Poland and delivered them to Paris:jewelry, paintings and others. And he made good money on it. Sławomir Koper reports:
Of course, nothing was done for charity, and Mikiciński was not considered to be particularly picky. While collecting salaries, he accepted anything of any value - works of art, jewelry, furs, carpets, alcohol. As a result, the consulate in Frascati quickly began to resemble a luxury store.
A suitcase full of gold
Moreover, Mikiciński did not hide that he had contacts with the Germans. In Warsaw, he visited the Gestapo headquarters in Szucha, feasted with German officers in restaurants, and officially told Minister Stanisław Kot in Paris that he would have to tell a certain officer he knew about their meeting.
According to Colonel Iranek-Osmecki, the activities of the consul in Warsaw were supervised by two Abwehr officers who drove him in their car during his numerous journeys . Captain Nobis also appeared in the capital. All these contacts allowed Mikiciński to do a lot under the occupation conditions. No wonder that the Polish authorities in France asked him to take some important people out of the country.
First, they were the wives of two high-ranking Polish intelligence officers:Major Jan Żychoń, who before the war was responsible for activities in the German direction, and the head of the Two, Lieutenant Colonel Stanisław Gano. Both ladies were safely in France, and the action became famous among the local Polish community. In such a situation, the consul was commissioned to smuggle even more important people - the wife of general Sosnkowski and the daughter of general Sikorski.
The article was based, inter alia, on the book by Sławomir Kopra entitled "Piekiełko nas Wisłą" (Bellona 2019).
How did Mikiciński accomplish this task? One day he just showed up at Jadwiga Sosnkowska's, who worked at the Ujazdowski Hospital in Warsaw. He had a letter from her husband, a false passport and a visa. During the trip she acted as his wife. They traveled by car to Wrocław, from there by train to Aachen and Brussels, and finally to Paris. Interestingly, the "courier" was carrying a suitcase full of gold, watches and jewelry. It could have ended very badly, because gold smuggling was punishable by death in Germany ...
General Sikorski's daughter, Zofia Leśniowska, was probably deported in a similar way. The diplomat once again showed his effectiveness. Although there were strong rumors that both actions took place with the knowledge and approval of the Abwehr, but for favors he was awarded the Order of Polonia Restituta.
The tomb near Haifa
The defeat of France in the summer of 1940 changed Mikiciński's situation. The Germans decided that he was no longer a useful collaborator for them and the police entered the consulate's seat in Warsaw. Workers were arrested, money and valuables confiscated. The raid, however, was carried out in an ostentatious manner, and the report about it appeared the next day in the "Warschauer Zeitung", which was unusual. This prompted the underground to suspect that the entire action was set up and was intended to authenticate the diplomat in the eyes of the conspiracy . The more that he himself was not arrested - he disappeared.
He appeared after a few months in Turkey. He was employed by the Chilean office there but, by his nature, he was more devoted to financial operations. Dill in "Piekiełek on the Vistula" says:
He transported Romanian and Hungarian currencies to Istanbul by diplomatic mail on a large scale, deposited them into Swiss accounts, then exchanged for Swiss francs to finally withdraw dollars. Profitability exceeded 100% and Mikiciński quickly multiplied his fortune. At the same time, a significant number of counterfeit pounds sterling circulated in the Middle East, which British intelligence associated with him. It was suspected that the Abwehr was trying to shake trust in the British currency .
Mikiciński also deported Zofia Leśniowska, daughter of general Sikorski from occupied Poland
The influx of counterfeit money exhausted the patience of the British. London began to put pressure on the Poles to settle the case of the former consul. In January 1941, Mikiciński was kidnapped by the employees of the branch of the Polish intelligence in Istanbul, led by Lieutenant Edward Szarkiewicz. He was lured into a place, anesthetized with an injection, and then flown to Palestine and placed in the Citadel Prison in Haifa.
During the interrogations, Samson did not deny contacts with Abwehr officers. However, he explained that he did not provide them with any information or received orders from them, but only paid them handsomely for their care . However, these testimonies were not believed, and due to the demands of the English, a decision was made to liquidate the prisoner.
It was taken care of by Szarkiewicz himself, who, while transporting the detainee from one prison to another, faked an escape attempt and killed Mikiciński with a shot in the back of the head. He was buried in an unmarked grave somewhere near Haifa. This is how the colorful story of an entrepreneur, diplomat, adventurer, agent ...
ended